Summer of 85 Review

Toronto Film Festival | #3 | Summer of 85

Warning: This review contains more spoilers than normal.

Contrary to popular belief, queer audiences are not difficult to please. Summer of 85 was perhaps one of the films I was most looking forward to out of the Toronto Film Festival; despite looking little different from your average 80's coming of age romance film, the sun-drenched cinematography and queer twist was enough to appeal to me. All we want is to be adequately represented on film, yet Summer of 85, like so many others, couldn't seem to pull that off, even with queer director François Ozon at the helm.

It's difficult to determine precisely where Summer of 85 goes wrong; even though I enjoyed the first half quite a bit, in hindsight the warning signs were all there, and I suppose I was just hoping that it would have a satisfying payoff. It's not difficult to determine how it went wrong, as the film seems obsessed with subverting coming of age cliches and queer stereotypes in edgy, psuedo-philosophical ways, but it never really gives any reason for why these ideas need to be revisited. It fails to say anything truly profound, and what we end up with is a pretty but generic coming of age tale that hits all of the wrong notes when it comes to queer representation.

The film follows young Alex, a 16 year old boy in France as he tells the audience the story of how he came to be the person he is today. The beginning of the film shows him being escorted out of a police holding center, readying for some sort of hearing. He introduces us to the story of him and David, and describes it as being about the time he met a man who became a corpse. We know from the beginning that David, his love interest, is going to die, and that their relationship was doomed from the start.

This would have been a red flag for many people, but if movies like the masteful Portrait of a Lady On Fire have proven anything, just because a movie deals with a tragic queer relationship, doesn't mean that it is inherently exploitative of said tragedy. The LGBT community has too much experience with prestige filmmakers exploiting their pain for the sake of art, thus normalizing the idea that being queer is some inherently awful experience, but there are still ways to tell our sadder stories without falling into this trap. I can't say for certain that this film is particularly offensive in this regard, but it really doesn't need to be; there are plenty of other awful tropes that it falls into aside from that.

The film is framed with this looming disaster in mind, and the way it's shown at first, with an edgy, almost punk-like energy, suggests that some serious shit is about to go down between the two. Perhaps they get involved in something shady; perhaps David is murdered for some reason or another; etc. It also very much seems to play into the protagonist's fascination with the idea of death, and also the idea that young love is doomed to fail because of its inherent naive passion - a sort of literalization of the chaos and emotional turmoil of youth.

For the first half of the film, this provides a darker edge that sets Summer of 85 apart from its peers, but ultimately this first half is pretty standard for this kind of story - though not necessarily in a bad way. The photography and lighting is absolutely beautiful, delivering stunning, sun-drenched summer vistas of a beach town in the middle of a beautiful season, and the look and feel of the film is suitably 80's, with artificial yet lovely film grain, denim jackets, wacky hair cuts and music by The Cure. The budding romance between Alex and David is sweet and full of adolescent energy, and the two of them have excellent chemistry together that makes it a joy to watch.

The trouble comes in the middle of the film, where out of nowhere David turns out to be unhappy in the relationship, flirting with women in front of Alex and telling him he's bored with him; that he can't be satisfied with just one person and that he refuses to be owned. Not only does this come out of nowhere, but it turns a likeable character into a harmful stereotype with no meaningful distinctions or subversions added to lessen the blow. With one fell swoop, David is turned from a troubled young gay man into a stereotypical flaky gay cheater who's unable to hold down relationships out of a fear of commitment. Not only is this a harmful archetype, but it also drags bisexual and polyamorous people through the mud as well due to the way the sequence is framed.

After this, Alex storms off and David tries to follow him but is killed unceremoniously offscreen, thus degrading his character even further from a stereotype to a pure plot device. This is a common trope in coming of age stories, but normally it takes a different form; a boy and a girl - usually white, always straight - fall in love and the girl eventually dies seemingly randomly, all to teach the boy harsh lessons about the fleetingness of love and the reality of grief, but ultimately he ends up becoming a better person. The life of the girl is secondary. This is no less dehumanizing and problematic when it's a gay boy instead of a straight girl filling this role.

THe rest of the film is boring at best and insulting at worst. It quickly becomes apparent that this is no different from the most average, generic coming of age teen movies you can think of. All of the interesting themes and framing devices become pointless; while the manner of David's death and the way in which Alex is eventually arrested are rather fitting for this subgenre, they fail to live up to the dark and intriguing way they were introduced as hooks, and that framing becomes more of an artificial way to get audiences engaged rather than a genuine part of the story. Alex's fascination with death is never truly developed, and in a particularly insulting twist, the film begins to seriously ask if he was truly in love with David at all, or if he just created an idealized version of him to love, thus missing that he was actually unhappy with the relationship. This would be an interesting question to ask, except that we never saw any reason to doubt that they were deeply in love, or that David was anything but happy, even from the perspective of an unreliable narrator.

There are other scenes that are just as odd and borderline inappropriate. David's mother, who's been characterized as somewhat unhinged and overprotective from the beginning, blames Alex entirely for David's death in a way that could work but ultimately ends up feeling forced, even as Alex continuously tries to make contact with her. There's a whole scene in which Alex cross-dresses to sneak into a morgue to see David's body, but ends up having a meltdown and attempts to straddle the corpse on the table. In the end, there's nothing more to this tragedy than the objectification of one character for the sake of the other's growth. Just because it's a gay romance doesn't make that any more okay than in a straight one.

Overall, this wouldn't even be that bad of a film if it weren't for theses issues. Perhaps fairly generic and rather forgettable as a result, but it would certainly have its fans. Its cinematography is beautiful and the acting by Félix Lefebvre and Benjamin Voisin as Alex and David respectively is great, with the two actors have excellent chemistry. There are some memorable scenes, such as the boating sequence in the beginning, the nightclub sequence in the middle (epilepsy warning!), and the graveyard sequence towards the end. All of this is ruined by themes that go nowhere interesting, pointless framing devices that do nothing but waste the audience's time, and an insulting and demeaning character assassination that is highly objectifying and, frankly, homophobic. These aspects take a decent coming of age film and turn it into one of the worst experiences I've had this year.

It's absolutely baffling to me to think this was created by a queer man. This feels like a particularly egregious example of the sort of cliche, fetishistic and exploitative queer prestige films produced by straight directors throughout the 2010's. We've come a long way as a community, but the fact that films like this are still being made and sweeping festival circuits tells me we still have a long way to go. We've got to move away from these cliched, easily-recognizable yet ultimately harmful stereotypes, and we've got to move away from holding up the stories of a very particular type of white, cisgender gay relationship as the image of the queer community in the 2020's. If we don't, we'll never truly have equality for all of us.

If you're looking for an actually good queer coming of age film from the past year or so, I'd suggest the Netflix original The Half of It or the Georgian film And Then We Danced.